Finding the final position for the engine

I fitted the subframe to my front cut and dropped the engine in place to test the side engine mount I had made, and it turns out I stuffed up the shape of that mount. It sat too far into the engine bay so I will have to make another one - which will look similar but moved toward the inner guard more. One more important issue I found was that using the engine crane and leveller allowed me to get the the engine level left-to-right. However when moving the whole engine rearward, the intake manifold would foul against the clutch master cylinder and bulkhead, but the gearbox & CV cups still needed to move back further. The engine would have to be tilted forward allow the gearbox to move to the rear and the intake manifold to move towards the front. The engine would have to be rotated around the axis of the driveshafts.

I decided that if I was going to make better use of my time, I would have to get the engine in it's final position and make the rest of the engine mounts while the engine was in-situ. I measured the height of where I wanted the CV cups to be and drilled a hole at that height in large block of pine wood. A bolt passes through the block and into the CV cup (which had another piece of wood about the shape of a tri-bearing in it).



This allowed me to support the rear part of the engine and then simply lower the crane to rotate the engine and tilt it forward. Below is pics of the intake manifold - before & after the engine was rotated - only a small amount was needed.


Now the engine is in place in the front cut (albeit supported by blocks of wood in pic below)